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San Francisco Free Wi-Fi Plan Fails
Reader r writes with news from San Francisco that Earthlink has backed out of contract negotiations to blanket the city with free Wi-Fi, citing money problems. Seems like only yesterday that Chicago's Wi-Fi deal fell apart for much the same reason. Quoting: "The contract, which was three years in the making, had run into snags with the Board of Supervisors, but ultimately it was undone when Atlanta-based EarthLink announced Tuesday that it no longer believed providing citywide Wi-Fi was economically viable for the company... EarthLink spokesman Jerry Grasso said that EarthLink was willing to work with San Francisco but had decided that it 'was not willing to work in the business model where EarthLink fronts all the money to build, own and operate the network.'"
Maybe they thought 'if it takes 3 years to just write the contract, we'll never even get the wireless installed before we're all dead.' That would sure change my outlook on whether or not it would be possible to make money from it.
Of course, if they could break even on this one, the next one they could make a little money (having had experience) and then have a massive rollout where they mass-produce everything and make a killing.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Wasn't Google going to do something like this?
P.S. first post
Really, why are authorities even promising monopoly wifi to companies anyway?
Deleted
Because it was?
Ok, so it was reported yesterday, but it happened close enough to be reasonable called "yesterday".
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
maybe they should just look into meraki.
Their city-wide WiFi plan fell apart when they paid a bunch of money and got nothing.
I wonder if this will affect Philadelphia also. We've been receiving advertisements in the mail announcing Earthlink as Philly's citywide wi-fi provider, but with Chicago and San Fran now stopped, and San Fran not seen as profitable, I find it hard to imagine that the Philadelphia city area will be as viable.
I've been to two Socialist countries, two Communist countries and three Free Republic/Deomcratic countries.
I kiss the soil of the U.S. every time I return.
I've see Communism first hand. Being told "sorry, you don't have water on Tuesdays and Thursdays" is unplesant. Yes, I understand there is a failiure in the infrastructure but it isn't corrected without incentive. People, sadly, acclimate to piss-poor surroundings. One or two generations of that and getting out is difficult.
What does this have to do with Wireless? A lot.
I thought about designing my own 'free' wireless network. The manpower and cost to keep it up and running is obscene. Even with free hardware and ISP service, the cost of making sure it's running 100% is a full time job, if not two.
Without a financial incentive, there is little to be gained. The leaches of society would tear down the system.
While Capitalism has it's flaws, humanity isn't willing to share and play nice. Yet.
It's only free until you get your pay stub.
Its just been re-organised, now its
San Fransisco- Wi-fi free
The fact that Google is blanketing the area in free wifi probably has something to do with this decision.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
The city of Minneapolis, MN is going wireless and in some areas is already providing service. The estimated completion date is December 2007. The charge is pretty reasonable too, only $20 or $30 per month depending on access speed.
i s/
More info here: http://www.ci.minneapolis.mn.us/wirelessminneapol
Many squad cars and firetrucks are already using the wireless technology and a number of cameras are used for survelence in high-crime areas. Since I drive through one of these areas every day, I can tell you the cameras have already made a real difference!
There is hope that with this kind of access, that the city will become a more livable place and that some lower income people will be able to use these services to better themseleves. While I hope that this is true, I'll also take it with a grain of salt and say that I will believe it when I see it.
This service was used for several days after the bridge disaster with very good results. Talk about trial by fire!
Here in Portland, OR MetroFi and the city collaborated to provide a similar service. They haven't quite gotten all of the city done, but the core is covered (and is damned spiffy). Perhaps this opens the door for MetroFi, some other service, or maybe google alone to pick up the ball
What do you know I wrote a novel
As it stands, here is the business plan:
Anyone would be a fool to invest in such a venture as it stands.
The game.
It's the Government's money. It's not like it's mine.
Citywide WiFi in Milwaukee is pretty much in shambles as well. Midwest Fiber Networks and the city made a deal that MFN would pay all costs associated with building the infrastructure. The city has been more or less uncooperative in granting full access to conduits and whatnot to make this happen. MFN keeps delaying the project because of this, and Milwaukee keeps bitching about it, yet it's the city's fault this has happened. In the meanwhile, a shoddy "test" area has been completed, but each party is pointing fingers at eachother for the delays.
It got so bad that earlier this month, Midwest Fiber Networks wants to pull out of the deal and chalk up the $20 million they've spent on this experiment as a bad learning experience. Can't blame 'em.
Philadelphia now has Earthlink Wireless throughout large portions of the city. All of the downtown is covered (about 20 square miles). The rest of the city coming soon. There has been some role out problems and speed issues but starting at 6$ a month for a citywide service, I expect to see a lot more notebooks in the park once they get the kinks worked out. I'll be signing up as soon as my existing contract is up.
Philadelphia now has Earthlink Wireless throughout large portions of the city.
I got curious. Is this Wireless internet behind a NAT? Does it support IPv6?
No money to be made in giving something away for free? File under no shit, Sherlock.
I will have a sig when the market demands it.
how much do you want to bet comcast and at&t mentioned they might not be so willing to continue to lease those lines to earthlink if this went through? Thanks for the free and open market FCC!
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5094200. html
Future events such as these may affect you in the future!
Minor problem: The poles are only powered during the night.
Link
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
My biggest fear about having these monopolies is that the SCOTUS will rule that you have little to no expectation of privacy from government surveillance if you are using the local muni wifi. If the muni wifi drives out competition in most areas, that would mean that you would end up with a system where the government could run rough shod on civil liberties.
The SCOTUS and other courts frequently pull legal arguments out their ass. The best one that comes to mind was Scalia's lowering of requirements on police to read rights because of the "new professionalism among police." He based a ruling on how he feels about the current state of police professionalism. This sort of weak-minded bullshit is common in the legal profession at large. Support this at your own risk, I say.
no such problem for adelaide australia with internode and its citylan service - https://hotspot.internode.on.net/partners/citylan/ basically covers the entire city center http://www.adelaidecitycouncil.com/scripts/nc.dll? ADCC:STANDARD::pc=PC_143 and they have free access at the airport http://www.aal.com.au/t1/wifi.aspx as well - all in all - adelaide is a great place to be if you want wifi - can sit in cafe's and hook in all over the city - and with the added bonus of air-stream http://www.air-stream.org.au/ you can get free internet basically city wide as unofficiall the air-stream network is hooked up to the citylan so you can get online without a problem
Earthlink badly overreached themselves here with two major mistakes - first, deciding to use Tropos equipment to paint an entire city. Most of the money you burn in setting up a wifi installation is in the install and then trying to get everything to work when your planning tools are out of sync with reality (which is almost always). Tropos's mesh equipment is crap, so they've wasted months and burned untold money trying to nail jello to a wall.
Second, trying to blanket an entire city at once is doable, but it's far more practical to grow the network from little seed areas (while keeping future growth in mind) - blanket a six block area of downtown, for instance, and then expand from that. This lets you get everything right for a small area before you apply that to larger areas - it's the way almost all WISP (wireless ISPs) operate and it works fairly well.
I think Earthlink finally realized it wasn't gonna work, which of course makes all the assumptions under which they signed contracts not so great for them.
Remind me again what the business plan is for free municipal wifi ?
Oh right, there is none.
A million monkeys and this is the best sig they could come up with...
I live there (here) and there are a lot of great things about the city, but one of them is not the city's ability to deal with infrastructure in any way that makes even the least bit of sense. Progress, such as it is, occurs as if the time dimension in space-time had no earthly relevance. Don't get me started on Muni. But anyway, if people had started putting up antennas, there'd be years of environmental studies about electromagnetic radiation poisoning (and people wondering, is WiFi organic?). That would get the ball rolling and activists would start roving the streets looking for home-base wireless nets and shutting them down because they "leak" dangerous electromagnetic energy. If you think I'm kidding, you should visit my home which is in a cellular dead spot, because for years a handful of crusty old neighbors have blocked plans to install a small camouflaged antenna on the roof of a church. Don't confuse "progressive" with "progress." :-)
Washtenaw county is home to CmdrTaco (Rob Malda), which has a plan to bring wireless to the whole county. It, too, seems to be having problems with financing. The plan was to have a free service with paid members getting faster access. The second link claims that to be profitable, 5% of the county needs to sign up.
But a good portion of the population (i.e. most of Ann Arbor) can get fairly cheap DSL through AT&T/Speakeasy (okay, maybe Speakeasy isn't so cheap), or most of the county (I think) can get cable through Comcast.
Students on the U of M campus (a sizable portion of the city's population) can get wireless from many locations. It's not uncommon to have people run open WiFi spots in neighborhoods around campus as well. People push these wireless services as enabling low-income households and rural areas to get broadband speeds. Low-income households are likely to not find the faster service worth buying, and rural areas still have substantial infrastructure costs (the houses are spread out more, and wireless access points have fairly pitiful range). I'm just not sure current wireless technology is really a better solution for the "last mile".
On the other hand, it seems to make some sense for dense downtown regions. People like to congregate there, and businesses might be willing to chip in (instead of many businesses administering their own wireless access points). People who live downtown might be willing to pay $10 or $20/mo to get faster speeds where they live and in all the businesses they frequent.
But county-wide, like this Washtenaw program? I'm just not sure the demand is there and/or the technology is sufficient.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
(Yes, the Simpsons live here. In fact, Gail Simpson is alderman of ward 2.)
Last year Earthlink rolled out wi-fi in the city of Anaheim with much (well, a bit of) local fanfare. I was leasing a small office for myself for part-time use in Anaheim and it sounded like a pretty good deal, esp. compared to what AT&T was offering for a small business package (which was basically the poorest home broadband package at 3x the price.)
I signed up on the year-contract to get the best rate. Service was very spotty. Aggravating at times, but generally ok for my purposes since I was using my access now and then to check email and to research any questions that came up in the course of my work. Most my work was being done offline.
What really turned me off the service is that Earthlink offered no email support -- you had to call their support line (off-shored) and wait on hold for an indeterminate amount of time to get simple questions answered. Also, I was never able to pick up a signal from my laptop's wireless card. I needed to be cabled into their ugly little wireless modem. Even from the Starbucks at the epicenter of the coverage area (across the street from City Hall), I couldn't get a signal on my wireless card directly.
I had a suspicion that the service was going to be a colossal failure. I canceled just last week as soon as my year was up. Hadn't even used it the last three months I paid for it. Interesting now to see these agreements crumbling left and right. I get the impression that it's much harder to deploy reliable city-wide wireless service than it looks on paper. (I saw crews installing the little wireless transponders on lampposts across the city -- how much has to be put in maintaining these things? Bird shit a factor?)
And with the limited initial rollout area, I always wondered how economically viable it was going to be. It was supposed to be citywide by around this time, but even then I question how many people are going to sign up for this. Finally, I suspect it's much less viable for the high-demand media-rich content people are now coming to expect online.
It's too bad because the failure of wi-fi just reinforces the cable/telecom strangehold over broadband service. Is wi-fi actually succeeding anywhere?
Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime... -- Machiavelli
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5094200. html
One astute commentator wrote:
A better idea might be to sell repeaters (and bandwidth) to businesses at a discount rate, so that they can give their customers free public wi-fi. If the City of Houston chipped in for a few of its parks and libraries, we'd be basically complete, since there are almost no public spaces in America that aren't businesses or government institutions.
technical writing / development
Ok, being a Libertarian-leaning individual myself, I'm obviously a little biased. But really, why did anyone think getting local government involved would produce better/more efficient results than we'd see without them?
Personally, I think there were more than a few people enamored with a utopian ideal of "free Internet for all!", without considering the reasons it hasn't really happened spontaneously first.
My thinking is, if the *demand* was truly there for wi-fi practically everywhere in a city, you'd already essentially be there, due to all the businesses throwing a $50 Linksys router up at their location and putting out a sign advertising it to their customers. That plus the sheer number of people with fast broadband connections in their home/apartment/condo who just feel like sharing with others, would provide pretty good coverage without ANY government intervention at all.
In reality, this is actually starting to happen, little by little, but it's not anywhere near "city-wide seamless coverage" because you don't yet see every Joe on the street carrying a wi-fi capable device around, hoping for a connection. The people running around with laptops tend to fit into little niches; your salespeople, your mobile I.T. workers, and your college students. The rest of the public doesn't really care if they've got wi-fi. Having a computer in their place of business they can use during the workday is more than enough for them.
Hell, where I live, all the McDonalds restaurants have wi-fi, and I've only seen someone use a computer in there a grand total of twice, ever! (Both times were at a McDonalds in a more affluent part of town, too.) It's almost a joke they have wi-fi at the ones near my workplace. People would be afraid of having their computer stolen at gun or knifepoint or something!
With all the Starbuko's in SF, they should think about blanketing the city with free Wi-Fi and the only catch is to put up with Starbucks popups. The Yuppie nation in SF would dig that and the $5 dolla make you holla coffee.
Down in the CBD, which is only about 5 sq miles, you can get the country's first free municipal wifi network. It started up shortly after the hurricane. It's done wonders for stimulating opportunities for lower income residents. Well, at least the business folks making five times the average population can get free wifi.
...and it should be known by now
They've been talking about something like this in Annapolis (capitol of MD, kinda halfway between DC and Baltimore) for awhile now, and as far as I can tell there is some network you can connect to based out of one, kind of out of the way part of town. Unfortunately, when you even CAN connect to it (difficult because of how far off it is and all the interference in between) you can't actually use the Internet. So "free" wifi is still limited to a couple cafes, living in an apartment building, or living near enough to one of the colleges.
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Well, what the Hell did they expect? You're telling a company "We're going to give you a trivial amount of money (about 10% of the actual costs). And for that, you have to blanket the entire city--even the shitty neighborhoods were no one is going to pay for your service and the high-end areas that are well-covered already. And we're not even giving you a monopoly--you still have to compete with the city's multitude of existing providers." How on earth did they EVER expect that to fly?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
It sounds like Wi-Max will be available soon, and will be able to provide wide-area coverage without requiring nearly as many base stations. Perhaps this is one reason why companies are suddenly deciding that big Wi-fi projects are a bad idea... because after investing $$$$ on thousands of Wi-fi stations, the competition will next year be able to take their customers away by installing just a few dozen Wi-max stations?
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Our plans for municipal wifi through AT&T just fell through, too. All of these muni-wifi plans biting the dust at just about the same time seems a little suspicious.
The best place I've found to get details on news like this is the blog "Wi-Fi Networking News", by Glenn Fleishmann. http://wifinetnews.com./
This was a joint venture between Google and Earthlink.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
My biggest fear about having these monopolies is that the SCOTUS will rule that you have little to no expectation of privacy from government surveillance if you are using the local muni wifi
... Miranda should not be preserved simply because it occupies a special place in the public consciousness. There is little harm in admitting that we made a mistake in taking away from people their ability to decide for themselves. By overturning Miranda, we reaffirm for the people the wonderful reality that they govern themselves, as stated in the Tenth Amendment".
No, you actually have more privacy if government operates it. Government is subject to various ammendments, but individuals or corporations are not. Also, there are various privacy acts that apply to government but not individuals or corporations.
The best one that comes to mind was Scalia's lowering of requirements on police to read rights because of the "new professionalism among police." He based a ruling on how he feels about the current state of police professionalism.
Scalia lowered nothing. He wrote the dissenting opinion. The court had upheld Miranda.
His argument was not based upon police professionalism: "The Court did not just apply the Constitution when it handed down Miranda, it expanded the Constitution, imposing an immense and antidemocratic prophylactic rule upon Congress and the states. It was an example of raw, judicial power that simply asserted a constitutional right
Note that by "governing themselves" he does not mean governing themselves well: "Preventing foolish people from incriminating themselves is the only purpose of Miranda, and that is a far cry from what the Fifth Amendment requires in terms of protecting someone from being compelled to incriminate themself. Nor is a lawyer required because the interrogators can do the same as any lawyer can -- tell the suspect they have a right to be silent. The Constitution is not offended by a criminal's commendable qualm of conscience or fortunate fit of stupidity."
Please stop trying to buy the internet. I don't want you to control my access or anyone elses because then you will be able to control *what* I have access to.
Government and the internet are like Pirates and Ninja.. they don't mix ok.
Bringing liberty to the masses. - http://freetalklive.com/
Once again, we see that REAL municipal planning is the only reliable way to go. Outsourcing doesn't even work for the private sector, and these morons want the government to outsource everything?
It just proves what I've said for over a decade: the "conservative movement" is nothing more than a thinly veiled program for committing large scale fraud against the US tax payer.
In my experience, nearly all free WiFi efforts are like that. All they do is pollute the spectrum. WiFi isn't meant for city-wide blanket coverage. If people try to force it to work like that anyway, pretty soon no one will have working WiFi.
Free Hans!
You're kidding, right? Sure the laws apply to the government. But who *makes* and enforces those laws?
I am very opposed to a government monopoly on any kind of information medium. Private corporations, sure. Let them have it. There will always be ways around it, ways to beat it. Who knows, the free market might even "correct itself" and eventually a competitor would come along and provide an alternative service and bingo! no more monopoly. But try and circumvent the government monopoly internet? That's a crime!!
Your trust in the government is naive at best.
Wherever you go There you are